Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. After both of her parents died, she moved to live with her uncle in Baltimore, where she attended Saturday evening salons, a kind of social gathering that years later she will emulate in Paris. At age 24, Stein earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Radcliffe College, afterward studied medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. When she reached age 29, Stein moved to Paris, joining her brother Leo. Together they began to collect post-impressionist paintings and helped artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. The two siblings established a literary and artistic salon in their apartment, where they’ve hosted leading artists and writers, like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. After Leo moved to Italy, Gertrude remained in Paris with her assistant and lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas. In her writing, Stein experimented with different kinds of techniques, like Cubism, abstraction, and stream-of-consciousness. Although her work was appreciated, it wasn’t comprehensible to everyone; thus, her only commercial success was “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” that was written from Toklas’s point-of-view. Stein remained in France through the two World Wars, at WW1 she even served as an ambulance driver for the French. During WW2 she hid from the Gestapo in a small village near the Swiss border. Stein died no long after the end of the war when she was 72 years old. Though she wasn’t always understood, Stein had a significant influence on contemporary literature and had been the subject of many artistic works, including musicals, movies, and plays. Read more...

Born as Sarah Margaret Fuller in Cambridge, MA. Her father, a lawyer and Congressman, was disappointed that his first child wasn’t a boy, so he provided her an education as if she was one, as well as forbidden her from reading “feminine” materials. At the age of 3, she learned to read and write, and at 5, she began learning Latin. At 9, Fuller began her formal education. Still, at 16, she felt that she is different from other girls her age, so she left school and came back home to continue studying independently, learning several languages, and reading world literature. In later years became to be known best-read person, male or female, in New England. At 24, Fuller published her first work – a response to historian George Bancroft, and a year later, she published her first literary review. When she was 27 years old, she began to teach under the journalist and educator Hiram Fuller and was paid $1,000 per year, an unusually high salary at the time. In 1939, 29-year-old Fuller decided to use her knowledge to educate women, so she gathered them and held what she called “Conversations”. These lectures were more like open discussions aiming to promote women’s education, focusing on subjects such as arts, literature, history, mythology, and nature. The goal of the conversations was to question, examine, and define women’s options. That same year, Fuller started to edit the transcendentalist journal “The Dial”, which made her an important figure of the Transcendental Movement, though she never identified herself as one. At the age of 34, Fuller published the book “Summer on the Lakes” in it she described her experiences traveling throughout the US and interacting with various Native-Americans tribes. The next book Fuller published was “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”, where she discussed women’s role in the US. The book became one of the most important works in American feminism and considered first of its kind. Fuller moved to NYC to work as a literary critic at the “New York Tribune”, she was the first full-time female book reviewer in the US, and two years later she became the first female editor of the magazine. During the four years she worked there, Fuller published over 250 columns regarding different topics, from art and literature to women’s rights and the plight of slaves. At 36, she was sent to Europe as the newspaper’s foreign correspondent, where she met many important figures, including Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, an Italian revolutionary who was ten years younger than her. They became a couple and moved to Florence, Italy. It is unknown whether they were officially married, though they were referred to as husband and wife, and had a son. In 1848, Fuller and her family sailed back to the US, but the ship hit a Sandbank close to the shore of Fire Island, NY. Most of the passengers and crew jumped and were rescued, but the bodies of the Fuller family have never been found. Margaret Fuller was one of the first active feminists; she promoted women’s education and employment opportunities, encouraged women to be independent in their marriage, and not to rely only on their husbands. She was also a humanist, advocating for social reforms, addressing issues such as African-Americans’ rights, prison’s living conditions as well as poverty and homelessness. Many prominent leaders of the Suffrage Movement regard Fuller as one of the movement’s major influencers, as Susan B. Anthony wrote about her that she was “possessed more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time.”   Read more...

Born in NYC and grew up in Scarsdale, New York. From age 5, her father sexually and physically abused her. Her mother knew of the abuse but was scared to interfere. The molestation stopped when Ensler was 10 years old, upon his death. As a teen, she used alcohol as a coping mechanism, an addiction that continued into her mid 20’s. At 22, after graduating from college, she had a series of abusive relationships, which dragged her deep into her addiction, and she started using drugs regularly. At 24, she married Richard McDermott, who convinced her to go to rehab. The couple divorced after ten years, during that time she adopted his biological son – the actor Dylan McDermott. After she got sober, she started writing for the theater. As a survivor of sexual abuse, Ensler suffered from physical disassociation, feeling that she could not inhabit her own body. In an attempt to understand her experience, she interviewed other women about their experiences; those interviews were the basis for the groundbreaking play “The Vagina Monologues.” The play explores subjects such as body image, consensual and nonconsensual sexual experiences, encounters with reproduction, menstrual periods, and vaginal care. It became a worldwide phenomenon, translated into 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries. Knowing for herself how it feels to be abused, she decided to dedicate her life to end violence against girls and women, and in 1998 she founded V-Day – a global movement advocating for ending gender terror. The organization founded more than 12,000 anti-violence programs all over the world. In 2011, they opened the City of Joy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which provides a community for survivors of gender violence. In 2012, the organization, led by Ensler, created the One Billion Rising campaign, fighting for justice and gender equality for women worldwide. Over the years she wrote 12 plays and 10 books, most of them are exploring women’s perspectives of social conventions. She has also been involved in several films, including the television version of The Vagina Monologues, “Until The Violence Stops,” and “What I Want My Words To Do To You.” In her 50’s she struggled with uterine cancer, which she details in her memoir “In the Body of the World.” Read more...

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers. At 8, she was injured in her eye after her brother played with a BB gun, causing her permanent blindness in one eye. The mark on her eye made her an easy target to her classmates, so she turned to poetry for comfort. Growing up in the segregated south, she attended an only black kids’ high school, from which she graduated valedictorian. Her high scores granted her a full scholarship to Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College in NYC. In this period, Walker had an abortion which caused her suicidal thoughts. She wrote all about it in her poems. In 1965, at the age of 21, Walker moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and became active in the civil rights movement. She worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program while serving as writer-in-residence in various academic institutes publishing essays and short stories. At 23, she married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in the south, and the couple had to travel to NYC to get married. On their return, they became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi since 1822, when the miscegenation laws passed. During their nine years of marriage, they suffered recurring harassment from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1970, at 26, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, following the life of an abusive sharecropper husband and father. Three years later, she was appointed editor of Ms. Magazine, published her second poetry collection and her first collection of short stories. In 1976, Walker returned to NYC and published her second novel Meridian, about several civil rights activists in the south during the 1960s. In the late 1970s, she moved to California, where she wrote her best-known work, The Color Purple. Published in 1982, the novel explores the struggles of a black woman in the racist and patriarchal society of 1900s Georgia. The book was a best-seller, and in the following year, 39 years old Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Later the novel was adapted into a film featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg and a Broadway musical produced by Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey. In 1984, she co-founded the feminist publishing company Wild Tree Press. She deepened the world of some of her characters from The Color Purple in two of her novels, The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, and created new characters that allowed her to delve into other social issues, such as female sexuality in By the Light of My Father’s Smile from 1998, and identity questions in Now Are the Time to Open Your Heart from 2005. Throughout the decades, Walker published seven novels, ten poetry collections, four short stories collections, four children’s books, and a dozen collections of essays and articles. In all of her work, Walker deals with the struggles of black people, especially women, and their experiences in sexist, racist, and violent surroundings. Often using Black vernacular, which highlights the hundreds of years of slavery and oppression, she had dealt with complex topics such as rape, isolation, bisexuality, and troubled relationships within the black community. Walker is a long-time social and political activist, promoting and fighting for various causes, from black and women’s rights to environmental issues, Palestinians’ fight for independence, and the elimination of female genital mutilation. Read more...

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton in Prince Edward Island, Canada. At 21 months old, following her mother’s death, she went to live with her maternal grandparents in Cavendish. Living with an elderly couple, she spent much of her childhood alone, creating imaginary friends, reading, and writing. By the age of nine, she kept a journal and wrote poetry, and at 16, she published her first poem, On Cape LeForce, in the Charlottetown paper The Daily Patriot. In 1893, at 18, she attended Prince of Wales College and obtained her teaching license in only one year instead of two. Afterward, she began to work as a teacher in various schools in Prince Edward Island, taking time off to study literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She kept writing, and in 1897, at 23 years old, Montgomery began to publish short stories in newspapers and magazines, reaching more than 100 publications in a decade. In 1898, she returned to Cavendish to take care of her widowed grandmother, living there for the next 13 years. In June 1908, she published her first novel and her most known work, Anne of Green Gables, inspired by her childhood experiences in the rural and traditional environment of Prince Edward Island. The book was a best-seller, going through six printings within six months, and later translated to over 36 languages and adapted into dozens of movies, TV series, films, radio, stage, and web production. The book’s success established Montgomery’s career as a novelist. In 1911, at the age of 37, she married Ewen Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, and the couple moved to Ontario. In addition to her duties as the minister’s wife, she continued to write and publish her work. WW1 had a significant impact on her husband. His religious melancholia caused him to decline mentally, and he ended up hospitalized. While taking care of her husband, she wrote another successful book series, Emily of New Moon, also set on Prince Edward Island. In 1926, Montgomery and her husband moved to a new congregation in Norval, Ontario, where they lived until her husband resigned from the ministry. The stress she experienced influenced her writing, and in 1933, she published the book Pat of the Silver Bush, which was darker an aimed toward adult readers rather than young people. In 1935, they moved to Toronto, where Montgomery had a breakdown that led her to return to her first heroine, Anne, and she published two more books in the series. The outbreak of WW2 had affected her mental and physical health, and by 1941, she did not leave her house. The following year, she died at the age of 67. She is buried in the Cavendish Cemetery on Prince Edward Island. Montgomery published 20 novels, 500 poems, 530 short stories, and 30 essays during her lifetime. Read more...

Mary Helen McKean-Malcolmson was born in Belfast, Ireland. When she was five years old, the family moved to Ontario, Canada. After graduating from school and before marrying Captain A.H. Malcolmson, she worked for a few years as a kindergarten teacher in Hamilton. In 1892, they relocated to St. Catharines, Ontario, where Malcolmson became an active member of various community organizations, including the Victorian Order of Nurses, the local Horticultural Society, and the board of Education. One of her concerns was the welfare of the youth, especially of girls and young women, and in 1909, after attending a rally of 10,000 Boy Scouts in London, England, she made up her mind to start a new chapter of Girl Guides in her own country. In November 1909, the company had its first meeting in St. Catharines, and within only one year, it became the first Canadian Company of Girl Guides to be officially registered. By 1912, the company had local branches throughout the country. Today, Girl Guides of Canada–Guides du Canada (GGC) is the largest organization for girls in Canada, with 90,000 active members. From its first days, the Canadian Company of Girl guides’ mission was to prepare its members for life, empower them, and give them leadership skills. Though the implementation of those goals had changed throughout the years, from learning to bandage wounds during WW1 to eliminating bullying in the 2020s, the organization’s purpose remained to provide a better world for girls – by girls. In addition to her role at the Girl Guides of Canada, Malcolmson co-founded the local chapters of the I.O.D.E (Independent Order of the Daughters of the Empire), served as vice president of the Mother’s Pension Board, and in 1918, founded the St. Catharines Council of Women and served as its first president. She passed away in St. Catharines at 71 years old. Read more...

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada, and grew up in Ontario and Quebec. From an early age, she was an avid reader, writing plays and stories at the age of 6, and by 16 began to write professionally. After graduating high school, she went to Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where she published articles and poems in the college’s literary journal. In 1961, she received her Bachelor’s degree in English, with minors in philosophy and French. In that same year, at 22, Atwood published her first poetry collection, Double Persephone, for which she received the E.J. Pratt Medal. She continued to graduate studies at Radcliffe College of Harvard University and pursued doctoral studies but did not submit her dissertation. She continued to write while studying, publishing two more poetry collections, The Circle Game (1966) and The Animals in That Country (1968). In 1968, at the age of 29, Atwood married the writer Jim Polk, but they divorced a few years later. Soon after, she met her life-long partner, the novelist Graeme Gibson, with whom she has one daughter. In 1969, Atwood published her first novel, The Edible Woman, a metaphoric satire about the social status of women and consumerism in North America. Those themes of feminism and materialism return in many of her works. Over the next decade, she published four more novels, eight poetry collections, and the award-winning short stories collection, titled Dancing Girls. While writing and publishing her work, Atwood taught English in various colleges and universities. Including the University of British Columbia, York University in Toronto, and New York University. She also served as MFA Honorary Chair at the University of Alabama and as Writer-in-Residence in Macquarie University, Australia, and Trinity University, Texas. During the 1980s, she published two of her most recognized novels, Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale, which also performed as an Opera, and later was adapted into a movie and an acclaimed TV show. Her success and productivity persisted well into the next two decades, publishing the novel Alias Grace in 1996, the Odyssey-inspired novella The Penelopiad in 2005, the praised trilogy MaddAddam in 2013, and The Handmaid’s Tale sequel, The Testaments in 2019. By 2021, Atwood published 18 novels, 10 short fiction collections, 22 poetry collections, 7 children’s books, 11 non-fiction, as well as graphic novels, television scripts, and Opera libretti. Her work was published in more than 45 countries, and some of it was adapted for stage and screen. In her writings, Atwood explores global and personal politics, women’s role in society, power dynamics, and environmental degradation. Most of her heroines are modern-urban women, often artists or writers, who fight to survive in a men-dominated society. Read more...

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. Growing up, she heard stories about the Civil War from relatives and family friends who fought in the war as Confederate soldiers. When Mitchell was able to read on her own, she read everything she could get her hands on. Her favorites author was Thomas Dixon, who wrote about the white south as the victim of the Civil War. Mitchell loved to write stories from a young age. She began with stories about animals, then fairy tales and adventure, crafting the covers of the books she wrote and adding artwork. At 15, with the encouragement of her English teacher, she wrote her first novella named “Lost Laysen.” The novella was discovered only in 1994, and it became a Best Seller when it was published. After graduating high school, she enrolled in Smith College in Massachusetts, but four months later, her mother died of the Spanish flu, and after finishing freshman year, she returned to Atlanta, taking care of the household, her father, and brothers. She never returned to college. At the age of 20, she made her society debut. She loved to flirt and was known as a heart breaker, getting engaged five times before marrying Red Kinnard Upshaw. In the four-month they lived together, she suffered emotional and physical abuse as a result of his alcoholism and violent temper. A year after the wedding, they got a divorce. In the need to provide for her own, Mitchell began to write articles for The Atlanta Journal. Her articles dealt with a diverse range of topics, including fashion, celebs interviews, and Confederate generals. Her journalism career was short-lived and less than four years of writing, and two years after she married John Mars, who was the best man at her first wedding, she quit because of an ankle injury. During those four years, she published 129 articles, 85 stories, and numerous book reviews. While restricted to home because of her injury, her husband brought her armloads of books to keep her mind occupied. One day he came with a typewriter suggesting she write a book instead of reading, and for the next three years, Mitchell dedicated her time to write a novel set in the Civil War-era. At age 36, she was convinced to publish her novel – “Gone with the Wind.” It sold 50,000 copies a day and 1 million within six months, becoming the most selling novel in the US, translated to more than 40 languages, and selling 30 million copies worldwide. A month after its release, Mitchell sold the motion-picture rights for $50,000, at the time it was the highest amount ever paid to a debut novelist. Disliking the fame, she declined requisitions for promotional appearances, preferring to respond to the thousands of fan letters she received. She never wrote another book. On August 11, 1949, on her way to the movies, she was struck by a speeding automobile, and died five days later. Read more...

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born in Paris, France, into a bourgeois family. She was raised Catholic and received her education at convent schools, wishing to be a nun. After WW1, her family lost much of their fortune, so her dowery was at risk, meaning that her marriage options were limited, and de Beauvoir saw that as an opportunity to become independent and earn her own living. In 1926, at 18, she attended the Sorbonne as a non-official student for preparations for the philosophy agrégation – a competitive national postgraduate examination. At 21, she passed the exam with the second-highest record, becoming the youngest person ever to pass the exam. At the time, she met the philosopher-to-be Jean-Paul Sartre. After de Beauvoir rejected his marriage proposal early on in their relationship, they formed a lifelong “soul partnership” that was sexual (but not inclusive) and professional. After receiving her degree in 1929, and for the next 15 years, de Beauvoir taught philosophy and literature in various high education institutes in France, including the Lycée Montgrand in Marseille and the Lycée Molière in Paris. During WW2, the Vichy government had dismissed her from her teaching position, which led de Beauvoir to launch her literary career, and she began writing plays, philosophical essays, and novels. In 1943, 35 years old de Beauvoir published her first book – She Came to Stay, exploring her real-life love triangle with Sartre and a young student named Olga Kosakiewicz, examining the complexity of relationships and the conscience to the other through existential lenses. The following year, she published a philosophical essay titled Pyrrhus and Cineas and a novel, The Blood of Others, questioning existentialist ethics. In 1949, at the age of 41, de Beauvoir published her most known work, The Second Sex – a 1,000-page analysis of the patriarchy and women’s oppression throughout history. In this groundbreaking book, she claimed that “One is not born but becomes a woman,” making the distinction between biological sex and the social construction of gender and ultimately defining the foundational of contemporary feminism. de Beauvoir published more than 80 books in different genres over the next four decades. Including novels, travel books, autobiographies, and philosophical essays. Among them were: The Mandarins, for which she won the Prix Goncourt, and a four-volume autobiography titled Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; The Prime of Life; Force of Circumstance. In her later works, she discussed the philosophy of aging and death. In her 1964 novella, A Very Easy Death, she detailed her mother’s passing, as well as in her 1970 book, The Coming of Age, which provided reflected bitterly on society’s perception of elders. Throughout the years, de Beauvoir used both her pen and voice to advocate for various political and social causes, such as the struggle of Hungary for independence, the student movement in France in the 1960s, and against American foreign policy during the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, de Beauvoir became involved with the women’s liberation movement in France. She wrote essays, gave lectures, and participated in women’s equality demonstrations. In her work and her actions, de Beauvoir influenced many worldwide feminists in her time and paved the way for all feminists to follow. She died of pneumonia at the age of 78. Read more...

Annelies Marie Frank was born to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1933, following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power as the German chancellor, the family moved to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where her father opened a local branch of the fruit extract company Opekta. 4 years old Anne quickly adjusted to her new home. She attended the 6th Montessori School, learned Dutch, and made friends. In May 1940, when Anne was 11 years old, Germany invaded the Netherlands and applied its antisemitic laws to the local population. Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes, and they were not allowed to visit parks, go to the cinema, or shop in non-Jewish businesses. Within a year, Anne and her older sister, Margot, were transferred to a segregated Jewish school, and her father was forbidden from owning his business but remained in charge behind the scenes with the help of his Christian associates. On her 13th birthday, Anne received a red-and-white checkered autograph book, which she used as her diary, referring to it as a friend named Kitty. She started documenting her life, describing her experiences as a teenage Jewish girl under the Nazi regime. Over time, with the growing deportation of Jews from the Netherlands, the Franks planned to escape from the country, but after their Visa application to the US was declined, they arranged a hiding place in Anne’s father’s office. A call-up notice for Margot to report for relocation to a work camp forced them to vacate their home ten days earlier. On July 6th morning in 1942, the Frank family moved into the secret annex – a three-story narrow space above the Opekta offices at Prinsengracht 263, with a door covered by a bookcase to hide its entrance. In the following month, Hermann and Auguste Van Pels and their 16 years old son Peter joined the annex, and in November, Fritz Pfeffer, who was a friend of the family, moved in too. Their only connection to the outside world was Otto’s colleagues, especially his secretary Miep Gies, who risked their lives to smuggle them food, supplies, and information about political developments. The life of the eight residents in the small annex was very stressful. They lived in constant fear of being discovered, keeping quiet during the day so they wouldn’t get detected by the people who worked in the offices downstairs. Believing they would return to school, Anne and her sister continued to study, and Anne spent most of her time reading books and expressing her thoughts and feelings in her diary. In her writing, Anne described her day-to-day life, from ordinary activities and her anger and frustration at her mother and sister to thoughts of the unknown future, hopes, and dreams. The diary is a reflection of a typical adolescent in an abnormal reality. She detailed her fear of capture alongside her evolving relationship with Peter Van Pels and their first kiss. She also wrote short stories and started a novel, sharpening her writing skills in the ambition of becoming a writer or a journalist. As time went on, Anne began to address more abstract and existentialistic subjects, such as human nature and her belief in God. When she heard on a radio broadcast that the exiled Dutch Minister of Education is planning to collect and publish diaries and documents written during the war, Anne began to rewrite her diaries into a running story, titled The Secret Annex. On the morning of August 4th, 1944, after two years in hiding, the German secret police stormed into the annex and arrested its inhabitants. They were taken to an overnight interrogation, relocated to an overcrowded detention house, and two days later, they were transported to the Westerbork transit camp. On September 3rd, the Frank family was deported on the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz concentration camp. Arriving after a three-day journey in a packed cattle wagon, the Franks survived the selection, while 549 out of 1,019 passengers were sent directly to the gas chambers. Though Anne stayed with her sister and mother, she was separated from her father, never seeing him again. Over the next two months, Anne was forced to hard labor during the days and crammed into overcrowded barracks during the nights. According to women who survived Auschwitz, Anne’s friendliness and kind nature enabled her to obtain extra bread rations for her mother and sister. Both Anne and her sister became infected with scabies and moved into an infirmary. On October 28th, 1944, Anne and her sister were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Northern Germany. Their mother stayed in Auschwitz, where she died of disease and starvation. In February 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp and killed 17,000 prisoners, among them 15 years old Anne and 18 years old Margot. When the war ended, Anne’s father returned to Amsterdam, the only one of the annex’s residences to survive. His former colleagues, Jan and Miep Gies, gave him Anne’s diary and belongings, which they had saved after their arrest, hoping to return them to her. He was determined to publish Anne’s diary to show the world what she and millions of other children went through during the war. In 1946, a newspaper article about the diary was published under A Child’s Voice. A year later, an edited edition of the diary was published in the Netherlands under the title Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944). Throughout the years, the book has been retitled The Diary of Anne Frank, translated into more than 70 languages, and sold over 30 million copies worldwide, making Anne one of, if not the most known, Holocaust victims. Read more...